Tailings Ponds & Responsibility
The extraction of bitumen from Alberta’s oil sands produces a mixture of water, sediments, and toxic petrochemical wastes (e.g., metals and other hydrocarbons) known collectively as tailings. For the last fifty years, fossil fuel companies with oil sands mining operations have stored these tailings in massive lakes referred to as tailings ponds. One of the purposes of these ponds is to reduce the need for new clean water, as the stored tailings can be reused for additional extraction, however this results in greater concentrations of these harmful contaminants within the ponds over time. Some of the water used for extraction can be recovered, but some of it cannot be. These toxic lakes currently store more than a trillion litres of petrochemical waste which continues to increase — in both volume and toxicity, as more and more bitumen is extracted, resulting in an environmental liability encompassing more than 250 square kilometres of Alberta’s landscape.
It was recently announced that oil sands companies could be allowed to release tailings water back into the Athabasca River by as early as 2023, raising many concerns about the health of the watershed and the ecosystems that rely on it. Until recently, companies have been forbidden from releasing tailings effluent into natural bodies of water despite evidence that they are already leaking. By Syncrude’s own calculations, roughly 785-million litres of tailings water seeped beyond their intended pond in 2017 alone. The Government of Alberta has regulations over the treatment of tailings fluids, but the development of regulations over the release of wastewater has been a slow process. The new regulations are intended to allow for the controlled release of 1.3 trillion litres of treated effluent into the Athabasca to ensure that the growing problem of tailings ponds is dealt with by eliminating these toxic lakes from the landscape for when mines eventually shut down. I recognize the desperate need to address this massive issue, and I appreciate that oil sands operators have been attempting to develop various methods for the treatment of tailings fluids, but the decision by our governments to allow for the release of contaminated wastewater into the Athabasca River is reckless and irresponsible when considering the downstream communities and ecosystems that rely on a healthy watershed for survival.
Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, Fort MacKay First Nation, and Fort MacKay Metis Nation are three Indigenous communities which live in the vicinity of the Athabasca tar sands and are likely to be impacted by the release of tailings effluent into their water supply. Given the Canadian federal government’s previous (and ongoing) history of settler violence towards Indigenous Peoples, this decision only serves to reinforce Canada’s lack of meaningful commitment to reconciliation by willingly allowing for the harm that may be caused by the release of this water into their communities. Settler Capitalism views our natural world only as resources for extraction and/or sinks for pollution, and this is just another example. Colonial regulators will no doubt establish (western) science-based limits and/or thresholds for tailings pollutants to ensure that released water meets their standards for safety, but the entire idea of a threshold only serves to allow for pollution to occur in the first place. Thresholds reinforce the colonial notion that a resource (or a landscape) is allowed “some” measure of pollution, and we — as a society, need to challenge this practice.
Companies such as Suncor and Syncrude, who have extracted massive profits from their operations in Alberta’s tar sands should be responsible for cleaning up their mess without risking further harm to Indigenous communities or wilderness. I don’t think that enough everyday working class Albertans recognize that the water which originates in Alberta then travels across the country, so the way that we treat our water here has literal downstream impacts for many others across Canada. I would argue that this means that we — Albertan people, have a responsibility to our fellow Canadians to steward the health and sustainability of our watersheds for the benefit of everyone — rather than treating it as our exclusive resource for exploitation. This means that we need to demand more of our governments at all levels to ensure that oil sands companies clean up this mess of theirs in an equitable and sustainable way, regardless of the impact to their bottom line. We cannot allow corporations to make money off of the destruction of our landscape without solutions for the protection of our neighbours and the environment.
